Knowledge Building and Motivations in Wikipedia: Participation as "Ba"

The online encyclopedia Wikipedia has been one of the prominent phenomena in the emergent of online user-generated content. This study explores Wikipedians' (Wikipedia users) perceptions of Wikipedia knowledge, their sense of community and motivations for participating in Wikipedia. We suggest utilizing the constructivist approach to knowledge, as a theoretical framework for understanding the co-building of knowledge in Wikipedia. Adapting the organizational knowledge creation model, as proposed by Nonaka and Takeuchi, for examining Wikipedia we emphasize the importance of the context, using a concept named Ba. We suggest that key factors of knowledge building are the users' sense of community and processes of interactivity that are enabled by Wikipedia. A central tenet of wiki community is users' motivation to contribute. In a study exploring the success of online community, Sangwan suggested that the "Uses and Gratifications" framework be applied, and identifies three key motivators for virtual community use: Functional, Emotive and Contextual. Following these observations, we study Wikipedians' motivations, thus highlighting the users' cognitive and integrative gratifications. To survey Wikipedians on these aspects, we posted a link to an online web questionnaire in the "Community Portal" of the English and Hebrew language Wikipedias. We provide some preliminary cross-cultural survey data.